Graphically Asphalt 7: Heat is by far one of the most impressive games on Windows Phone. Gameplay is fun, visuals stunning, and the choice in cars should keep most gear heads happy. One big complaint about the game though is the amount of space it takes up in storage.

The game was 878M but required 4.7GB of free space. Ouch for users with limited storage – like the 8GB version of the HTC 8X. An update today knocks some of that space down.

If you update Asphalt 7: Heat you’ll see that the install went down from 878MB to 512MB. No word on how much extra space it takes up. But it’s better than nothing. In addition, devices like the Lumia 620 or 520 with a more limited 512MB of RAM can now download the app and play along...huzzah!

Playing around in the game we didn’t spot any other additions or differences. Your battery will still need to carry around a whistle for protection.

You can get Asphalt 7: Heat for $0.99 (free trial) for Windows Phone 8 devices right here in the Store, use the QR code below, or swipe to the right in our app.

Really, no. It is space management. This would be practically the only "app" you could have installed with the small memory availability of some WP8 devices.
For big apps like this, and memory management reasons, I would love the ability to swap games in and out without losing save game data.

+1
The back up feature would be ideal and it is up to devs to implement. Look at Dragon's Blade X for example which backs up your saved data and that's an indie developed project. From an MS prospective, they should allow Xbox branded games to tap into the cloud storage feature that the 360 uses, only makes sense as the live account syncs achievements on all 3 platforms.

As far as i am aware, cloud backup for games is available, but very few games use it. Somebody important might prove me wrong on this, but i'm sure i read it at some point on this site. Would be great to make cloud game saves mandatory.
Plus i don't think ios or android can do it, so thats also a nice bonus

I never heard anything about a unified cloud storage option on the windows phone provided like it is for the Xbox 360. Some individual games do attempt to use their own servers for cloud storage of your saves. This ends up being a crash and burn in most cases. In this sense of cloud storage, both ios and android are already doing this as well, as it is up to the developers to include the option for now.

Hopefully all of the other newly released games and apps will be optimized too. With Nokia pushing for inexpensive phones, standard specs of minimum is needed so people won't feel gipped for the phone they purchase. Love my 920, though :)

The thing is with programming, you can always find a way to make the code more optimized and less cluttered, hence less bits for each correction you do. Since these programs are often tricky, once they optimize it, it tends to reduce the size greatly, yet with still the same performance. Software engineers have gotten far :P haha

Edit: A reinstall fixed it... but of course that meant i lost all my progress. And of course I still can't get past the overzealous username filter to be able to actually play multiplayer without creating a new account, because apparently the 'HOF' part of my username is somehow a swear that can't be in an online gaming username (despite the fact my Gameloft account already exists, and logs in for the "Gameloft Live" section of the game).

Are you kidding...? The lowering of the graphics makes the game playable (now that it has been optimized for the Adreno 225 limitations), making the game FINALLY run at 30 fps. Prior to this update, I hardly played the game due to the low framerate. This is huge, as it shows Gameloft recognizes the limitations of our hardware, and will most likely do the same for other games to run smooth...
Say what you want about it, but facts are facts: we have a GPU that's isn't exactly that great. Its not TERRIBLE, but Microsoft should've definitely gone with the 320. The 225 should be fine for a while until people can upgrade to newer devices released down the line, but it will require this type of stuff to happen for games to run smoothly...

I don't know if it's just me, but the frame rate seems WAYYY smoother after the update.
I'm a frame-rate junkie and I almost un-installed Asphalt 7 because it got choppy, but I tried it again on my HTC 8x after the update and it seems smooth as a baby's bottom.
Can anyone else try and confirm?

Yes, that was my impression too. I own the 8X and I just fired up the game after the update just out of curiosity and I was impressed because the race was visible smoother, but that didn't helped me finish the time race lol. Anyway great improvement; I'm happy to see that.
Unfortunately I don't know if it because my location in Europe but I can't seem to have any online races, I only had one when I purchased the game and that was it.
Why people don't play online?

Damn why did i see this post after leaving my home WiFi zone? Now i have to wait all day. Do the graphics looks poor now? Would be disappointing get a visual downgrade, but appreciate the optimisation as it freezes when playing personal music in the background.

In other news: Doodle Jump pulled of he Marketplace.
I deleted it to make room for Asphalt, which of course still failed to install, and now I can't reinstall Doodle Jump because it's "no longer published".

The game definitely runs much smoother, but it also looks like crap. It seems they applied heavier compression to all graphics so there are a lot of visual artifacts. There's something off with in-game textures, like they're lower resolution. I haven't played enough to see if they've disabled reflections as they had on Android. Basically it does look more like the Android version, which had left me unimpressed.
As far as I'm concerned it's not an improvement; I thought framerate was decent to begin with. I would have at least prefered an option. Why can't they offer a quality slider like you get with PC games?

Okay, having played a few rounds I have to go back on some of my criticisms.

I still think textures seem slightly lower res. It also seems there's less ansiotropic filtering than before, so the road lines blur out a lot closer to the foreground than before. On the other hand, it appears there have been some updates. Everything looks more vibrant and brighter and there's more detailing on buildings. There's a bunch of stuff like grafitti and signs I don't remember seeing before. Now when you take shortcuts you can actually see where the road goes. Car reflections are still there and unlike the Android version textures are still present on buildings in the distance.

I've got to say, the consistently smooth framerate is nice. The game seems easier, I don't know if AI has been adjusted or the framerate improvements.

Without question, UI items look a lot worse, but the game is down to 900MB from 1.6GB. One of the reasons I uninstalled Asphalt 6 off the iPad was because I was running out of storage and this was the biggest app by far.

As much as I would like to attribute it to a placebo effect, I just did a race in Paris and that course really looks like crap. To be fair, other race courses seem to have suffered less. I just wish they had included a quality slider in the settings menu, as was mentioned before.

I was playing in Paris before the upgrade and after it I thought for a moment something went really wrong as instead of the sky there was a plain white color, the brightness was up 100% and everything looked like crap. This track is really the worst of them all now and I wish I could downgrade to the previous version. Also the textures are definitely in lower resolution, especially on buildings from close distance. I'd rather have lower framerate and superb graphics quality than a game that looks like crap. I hope Gameloft will fix that in future versions or they could simply publish two games - one for lower spec devices and the second one "HD" for the high end.

Could someone show the before and after. I'm scared they lowered the graphics too much and right now on my 920 it runs really nice no problems whatsoever with frame rate. So far I think I'll pass on this update.

Lumia 620 User.(WP8)
I have some problem.
I Manually Downloaded the APK file of ASPHALT 7 HEAT. (Trial) from official Market site.
I have 3.06 GB free in Phone and 3.19 GB free in SD Card.
Copied the APK file in SD card, Put it in L620, Rebooted it.
Store > SD > Asphalt 7 Heat >
Now as there is no "downloading" to be done its just Installing where after (~roughly) 25% of installing it throws an error "Attention required. Tap here".
No matter what i do this doesnt seems to let me install it fully.
Wifi always on, No battery Saver, Find My phone ON (but shows off in little fonts, but its on i think.)
Anything more !?
I planned to check out the trial version of Heat and Buy it afterwards, but this is really not cool.

hi please tell me how to get Asphalt 7 heat because its not listed in the store & when I download it from external source it ain't sowing up in the sd card section of my phone please do tell me how to get the game